* Venky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2008-05-15 04:36]:
> On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 09:55:02AM -0700, Stephen Hahn wrote:
> > > Let me try and re-state my point in an unambiguous manner -- if
> > > a project is open source, the only format relevant to a distribution
> > > maintainer would be source code.  If there is an exception to this
> > > rule, I am not aware of it.
> > 
> >   (It's somewhat generous to call a tautology a rule.)  
> 
> Not really.  There are reasons why distribution maintainers prefer
> building from source, and that is to ensure quality and also because
> each distribution's requirements differ.  We do that with the SFW
> consolidation.  The default install prefix of most GNU applications
> is /usr/local and we switch that to /usr or /usr/gnu.
 
  I was being polite.  Let me go further and state that a solution that
  would somehow prefer software for which the source code was available is
  certainly incomplete or probably also incorrect.  

> >   As has been
> >   stated before, pkg(5) does not contain a build system by design--as a
> >   result, the practical problem of absorbing components from package
> >   publishers using both legacy packages and proto areas has been very
> >   straightforward.
> 
> True, though I'd suspect a lot of it is because we have been
> depending on the standardized build procedures currently used to
> build the SVR4 packages.  If we had to build from source all the
> packages we distribute currently via pkg.opensolaris.org, the lack
> of a standard build system would be felt more acutely.

  If you believe that we could convince all of the current System V
  package providers to just switch over directly, that's... interesting.
  Of course, since we know that we don't have unencumbered access to
  source for many of them, the scenario is irrelevant.

  I will let you have the last word, of course.

  - Stephen
  
-- 
[EMAIL PROTECTED]  http://blogs.sun.com/sch/
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